


set in the stars

by bowlingfornerds



Series: favourite fics [12]
Category: The 100
Genre: Alternative Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/M, Soulmate marks, Soulmates, There is death literal actual death, at least Wells is alive in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-30 20:12:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5178140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bowlingfornerds/pseuds/bowlingfornerds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke checks her mark every morning, to make sure it's still black. She searches for his name in everyone she meets, hoping to one day meet her soulmate.</p><p>OR: Soulmate AU in which soulmate marks turn grey when their soulmate is dead.</p><p>(50th fan fiction I've posted to AO3)</p>
            </blockquote>





	set in the stars

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS MY 50TH FAN FICTION ON AO3. I AM CELEBRATING. I WROTE THIS FIC TODAY. I HAD IT BETA-ED AS WELL. I'M PROUD OF IT AND I REALLY REALLY HOPE YOU LIKE IT BECAUSE IT WAS REALLY FUN TO WRITE.

Clarke checked her hip every morning when she woke up. She checked the colour, poked it and nodded, satisfied, before getting dressed. Every morning, Clarke did the same. She made sure it was still black and clear, and she would nod because as long as it was, she would have something to look forward to.

Soulmate marks were awful things to have, Clarke knew. Her father didn’t have one, and while that made his life easier in some ways, it also meant that when her mother’s actual soulmate turned up, Jake Griffin had been cast aside and divorced. Clarke knew that, either way, soulmate marks had to capability to ruin lives. If you had them, you could focus your entire existence on getting to meet them, and if you didn’t, you were practically sentenced to a loveless life.

But Clarke made the most of having one. She checked it every day to make sure her soulmate – a person (she wasn’t sure if they were male or female) called Bellamy – was still alive, and she went about her day, knowing that when she met them, she would be able to have a life she was invested in; something to fall back on.

In the living room, Clarke’s roommate, Raven, was already up.

“Late start,” Raven noticed when Clarke emerged from her room. Clarke nodded in response.

“I don’t start until two,” she replied. Clarke worked in a hospital; she was currently doing her time in Accident and Emergency, bandaging people up and telling them to stop climbing trees or get used to life with only one arm. After a particularly late shift the night before, she was given the morning off. “Want to go into town and make the most of it?”

Raven’s soulmate was a man named Finn Collins. Clarke had once dated him, when she was younger, and they broke off amicably, knowing they were doomed, and well, didn’t have all that much in common. Finn, however, turned out to be a dickhead; cheating on his own soulmate with a girl in a bar, and Raven was left alone. But not alone-alone, because she had Clarke to pick her up, and Clarke wasn’t going to let Raven fall.

“I saw you eyeing that girl’s name badge,” Raven said casually as they left the café, drinks in hand. Neither of them could really afford to buy anything other than drinks, so they wandered down the streets, breathing in the warm air and looking in the windows of shops.

“Of course I did,” Clarke shrugged. “I saw ‘Bell’ and was practically staring.”

“She was an Isabelle?” Raven asked. Clarke nodded. While Raven had collected the drinks, she had asked the cashier what her name was short for. Clarke wasn’t relieved exactly, to find out that she wasn’t her soulmate; she was pretty and about the same height; but there wasn’t the immediate spark that Raven had described about meeting Finn. There was no invisible cord, pulling them together. “Sucks,” Raven added.

“It does,” Clarke agreed. “I’ll get there, though.”

“They’re still alive?” Clarke, out of habit, lifted the bottom of her shirt up, to check on the name. Bellamy was still black and solid; written in a neat cursive that looped the ‘y’ and had a slight flourish to the ‘B’. She had adored his signature since the day she first spotted it, at ten years old.

“Still breathing,” Clarke agreed. The rule, with the names, was only that they could signify whether the other person had died or not. If they were dead, the name would turn grey – if not, it would stay black. Clarke checked it on the principle that she wanted to make sure her soulmate was still out there; but, in the end, it became a ritual of making sure love was still alive, somewhere. She swallowed, lowering her shirt once more. “We don’t even know that they’re local,” Clarke mused. “They could be living in Africa, or Asia – not here.” Raven nodded, straw of her drink between her lips.

“They could be,” she agreed. “But I don’t feel like you’re as unlucky as Wells.” Wells was Clarke’s best friend, and the single unluckiest person on Earth. It wasn’t just that he was a clumsy kid, had a dead mother and a father who didn’t like children, or that his childhood home _literally burned down_. No, Wells’ name was foreign; little symbols on the back of his left calf. He was still figuring out how to translate the name, let alone search the internet for them, when the symbol turned grey before his very eyes.

“No one is as unlucky as Wells,” Clarke continued. “I would hate to watch my mark turn grey.”

“Must be really terrifying – especially if you’ve never met them.”

“And never will.” The two women moved in front of a window, staring at the items on various shelves absently.

“Soulmates are bullshit,” Raven added.

“Oh, yeah?” Clarke asked. She watched Raven nod in the reflection of the window.

“Just think about all the soulmates we know – Wells never met his because she died; mine turned out to be a cheater; your father wasn’t even given one and your mother found hers after marrying someone else.” Clarke gritted her teeth a little, but Raven kept going. “My mother, even, hasn’t met hers because they’re not at the bottom of a bottle. Soulmates were made to piss us off.”

“Really.” It wasn’t a question but Raven nodded.

“They were made to let us know that there _could_ be this singular person out there who’s perfect for us in every way – make sure love never dies and stuff – but it doesn’t guarantee a good relationship. It doesn’t mean we’ll meet them, or when we do that they’ll be what we want them to be. It doesn’t mean the relationships will last.” They moved to the next window, sipping at their drinks. “I hope, Clarke, that your Bellamy is a good one – but it just doesn’t feel like it will be.”

Clarke wrapped her arm around Raven’s shoulders, pulling the two girls together so their temples touched.

“They’ll be a good one,” Clarke promised. “I can feel it.”

-

That afternoon, she sat in A&E. It was a slow day, barely any injuries, and Clarke had resorted to playing pinball on the computer. The fluorescent lights, overhead, flickered and there was the faint sound of the news on the TV, from above the vending machine in the waiting room. Distantly, she could hear pagers; people yelling, coughing – but that was a constant background noise she was used to; so much so that she’d be surprised when she returned home that it wasn’t there.

The day got interesting, however, when sirens sounded.

Clarke was immediately paged, and she dashed from the room, jogging down the linoleum hallways until she reached the gurney, being rushed down the hallway.

“Gunshot wound,” a paramedic announced, as they went. “Upper stomach, by the left lung – he’s bleeding out.” Clarke took over, pressing her hands on the wound as he was pushed into an empty room. Around her, people bustled about; responding to her instructions. She briefly noticed a tall, dark-skinned man waiting outside the room, but those thoughts disappeared soon after.

She had this strange feeling in her gut, though, as she worked; moving him into immediate emergency surgery and assisting as the head surgeon extracted the bullet. It was this tug, plain and simple, pulling her towards him. When she touched his skin she felt electricity; when she looked at him her head felt dizzy. Clarke put it down to illness as she worked, and pushed the feelings aside.

They went on for hours; blood transfusion, fixing up the inside of his body where the bullet perforated it, resuscitating him when he flat-lined.

But that wasn’t enough.

There was a final flat line; long and clear, and Clarke’s ears felt like they would burst. She felt a pressure behind her eyelids; like tears threatening to overflow and she couldn’t work out why – she had never felt like this over her patients. They gave him shocks but it didn’t wake him; the man was dead on the operating table.

Clarke gritted her teeth as she snapped off her gloves, being handed a form to take to the man, waiting outside. Gunshot wound, she already knew. Received in the line of duty was new. He was a cop; shot down in a warehouse.

“Could you talk to his partner?” Sinclair asked quietly, nodding back to the body. “We need to get this cleared up.” Clarke nodded.

“Sure, of course.” She walked out, a living zombie, into the hallway, tugging at her mask around her neck and sighing. Outside were two people; the dark-skinned man she’d seen before, and a young, pretty girl, about twenty. They were hunched over in their chairs; the woman crying and the man holding her.

“Uh, hi,” Clarke greeted. The girl immediately shot up.

“How is he?” Clarke didn’t reply, just held her hand out for the forms in the man’s hand. Clarke’s eyes skimmed across the details until they landed on his name. Then, like his, her heart stopped. She swallowed, her hand flew to her hip and she didn’t even need to look, to know. But she did anyway. “How is he?” The woman demanded again, but Clarke just thrust the papers in her direction before shoving back the fabric around her waist.

There, on her right hip, with a loopy ‘y’ and a capital ‘B’, Bellamy’s name was grey. Clarke let out a strangled cry, stepping away from the people who watched her with wide, scared eyes.

“You’re…” the man trailed off, and the girl stepped forward, tears silently drenching her face.

“You’re his soulmate?” Clarke swallowed, making another sound, caught in her throat. She couldn’t speak, just clenched one hand in her clothes as the other rose to her mouth. She felt the tears trickle out, one by one, as the strangers stared. “Is… Is your name Clarke?” She nodded erratically and the stranger sighed, sniffing. She rubbed her nose as the first of her tears started to pour anew.  “Bell’s – he’s –“

She didn’t hear the rest of the words, because Clarke was pushing back into the operating room, shoving the surgeons out of the way. They had cleaned up some of the blood, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about the gloves she wasn’t wearing, or her mask not being on; she pushed Sinclair aside as he protested, removing the sheet around the man’s – _Bellamy’s_ – torso. It didn’t take long to find her name, printed in black, bold lettering; a capital ‘C’ and ‘A’, even though the rest was in lower case.

She stepped away, letting out another cry, lowering herself into a crouch. It was against procedure for family to be in the operating room, but suddenly she was flanked by the dark-skinned man and the woman, the latter of the two crying over the body she saw in front of her. The man crouched down to Clarke’s height, though, pulling her in gently.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s going to be okay.”

-

Clarke attended Bellamy’s funeral even though she had never met him. She learned everything she could about him; spent time sitting in his room and crying because she had felt the pull of the invisible cord and ignored it; Clarke hadn’t relished in the feel of his skin or the electricity that sparked.

She cried for the life she didn’t have; the freckles she didn’t get to count and the hair she never wound her fingers in. Often, Octavia would join her, and she would recount memories for the both of them. Clarke knew that his sister wasn’t happy with her being there at first, but soon stopped minding, as it became obvious of Clarke’s distress that matched hers, and the way Octavia healed by letting out her feelings. Clarke listened to all of them and cried in the presence of his friends, as well as her own.

She sucked it up for work, even after she was given time off, and she let her father travel a hundred miles just to sit on her sofa with her.

Clarke’s everything ached for Bellamy; she’d _seen_ him; she’d _been_ there with him and watched him die. Wells may have seen his mark turn grey, but it was nothing like witnessing the actual death.

-

She didn’t fall in love, not really. It took years before she let someone touch her in the way she had always expected Bellamy to. Octavia had told her long ago that it was okay for her to fall in love with someone else; and both of her parents had agreed. Just because there was a single person who was perfect for her, didn’t mean that no one else out there would be, too.

Still, after two years of watching history documentaries, just so she could try and see even a little of what Bellamy did, she walked into a bar and let a girl kiss her. She went into a nightclub and made out on the seats, fucked in the alleyway, went to their place, time and time again but never let anyone come to hers. She watched as Raven kissed Wells at a Christmas party, and realised that both of her backups – the remaining options she’d had – were now gone as well.

She got drunk and she didn’t care; she turned up to work hungover, but it was part of the healing process she was sure. It was just taking a while, was all.

Then, a man who had worked with Bellamy – pale skin and sharp features – saw her at a bar, and said he recognised her from a couple of the gatherings that Octavia and her friends held. They talked about soulmates eventually, because there was no way to talk about Octavia without mentioning Bellamy, and Bellamy without mentioning the grey mark on her hip. He had nodded, knowingly, before pulling up his own sleeve.

“Died in front of my eyes,” he told her. The name was John, and the man in front of her had shrugged. “He wasn’t anything romantic to me – but he was my best friend.” At Clarke’s blank stare he added, defensively: “best friends can be soulmates, too – it doesn’t have to be romantic.” Clarke nodded.

“It doesn’t,” she agreed. She let Murphy kiss her, even though he was too rough and his hands had too much pressure. But he didn’t touch her hip, and for some reason she was grateful of that. They kissed out to the taxi, up to his apartment, into his bedroom, and she didn’t care. Clarke was searching for happiness and while she didn’t find it in his apartment, she found it later on.

Clarke found her happiness in a little boy, nine months later. She found it in the curly brown hair he had; the same shade as Murphy’s, but with the style of hers. She found it in his grin and the way he stared up at her, in wonder. She didn’t mind Murphy walking in and out; promising that he would be there because he knew what it was like without a father, but he knew he wouldn’t be a good one to his own. She didn’t mind at all, because there was a boy in front of her who looked at her like she hung the stars, and light radiated from his skin.

Clarke named him Bellamy, and she found peace.

**Author's Note:**

> AYE THANK YOU FOR READING. PLEASE TELL ME ALL OF YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS ABOUT THIS IN THE COMMENTS AND CLICK THE KUDOS BUTTON. I do have a bunch of prompts to catch up on on tumblr, but if you want to prompt me (and I do the ones I like more, first) then it's bowlingfornerds.
> 
> Also, I can't really resist putting Murphy into my fanfics. Sorry.
> 
> Thanks for reading.


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